Ozine Refresher 

Old wine in a virtual bottle 

Of all the print-related magazines he has known since his college days, only one remains in his collection after fifty years in the printmaking world. It’s more like a oversized soft-cover book and gave him the precedent that was the way of future ‘zines.

Hybridizing

"But that, I think, is going to be an exciting new area, new development, from crowd sourcing and if all goes well, those stories could be published in a fiction-only Femina special issue. We could select some of those authors, we could get them published, we could help them get published and hopefully at the end of it monetize it also for ourselves."

This is the last paragraph in the ten-part message from Rachel Bartlett, a British observer who wrote about the ten points of crowdsourcing for content of some online magazines. I caught the article when I considered crowd funding my online magazine, PrintmakingWorld Online. It was a case of mistaken identity—the ten points were not about raising money for a startup at all but rather the article was about getting an audience of readers and subscribers to provide content and ideas for the already-established magazine.

I used the ten points for ten days to help my thinking about starting PrintmakingWorld Online, or, as I have come to call it, Ozine—after the 1970s movement for alternative magazines called ‘Zines. By reading Bartlett’s account, and then extending the case of mistaken identity, I am making a hybrid out of mixing content-quest into a money-quest.

What came to me today was the fact that every time I tried to think of a successful printmaking magazine, in my mind I recalled the one magazine that stands above all the rest—a magazine I still have in my collection, called Artist’s Proof. Of all the magazines I read since the time I was an undergraduate in college (Gebrauschgrafik, Print) and subscribed to during my college teaching days (Print Collector’s News), Artist’s Proof stands out because it was not only a glossy magazine exclusively about printmaking and printmakers, but had very little advertising.

From that experience I concluded that future printmaking magazines would be very expensive to produce and therefore expensive to buy. The resources to produce a paper-based magazine are so great that they require multitudes of advertisers with little regard to what the advertisers are pushing. Subscribers, too, must be multitudinous and only by selling the magazine cheaply can enough subscribers be enlisted which means, often times, cheapening the content and catering to compromised human mentality.

This is elitist thinking, I know; yet it has been the elite who have preserved what we know of printmaking so that the printmaking experience can be shared with the people who count the most—the young people who are, at ages 4 to 18, in the years they will form skills, knowledge and an attitude suitable to help save Earth’s human life sustainability. A printmaking experience can be useful for the transferrable skills obtained by making prints or making associations between printmaking, society and economics.

Rachel Bartlett: “10. Use the experience to refresh thinking”

For Toiminen, one of the most important outcomes of the experience has been to encourage Olivia's editorial team to "regenerate, recreate and innovate in a new way. I think it's a bit obnoxious to consider that everything we do that is new and fun for us will be interesting for the audience," she said, adding that by engaging with readers and considering the ideas they bring to the table, journalists can "find themselves in a different place which is a source for creativity".

Operating in this new environment can also spark entirely new ideas for products, such as the fashion blogger magazine at Bonnier, which incorporates some of the underlying crowd sourcing ideas. Similarly, at Worldwide Media, Rai said that other magazine editors within the group are now "thinking of ways to do crowd sourcing, whether it's an entire issue or sections". And Femina itself has also stumbled across a potential new business which could see its readers more regularly writing fictional content, under the name of Femina Fast Fiction.

"If our readers are so keen to write, we just want to check out whether they're keen to write only on subjects that we give them, or are they keen to write fiction? I am quite hopeful that within the next month or so, we will be launching this new platform where we'll invite people to write their fiction stories on our website, on the tablet, the mobile, as well as hopefully on Twitter. So we'll have fast fiction and very fast fiction! But that, I think, is going to be an exciting new area, new development, from crowd sourcing and if all goes well, those stories could be published in a fiction-only Femina special issue. We could select some of those authors, we could get them published, we could help them get published and hopefully at the end of it monetize it also for ourselves."

What did I learn?

What I take away from reading Rachel Bartlett’s ten points on the benefits of getting ideas from your readership is the interaction between the makers and those for whom you are making. It is the same relationship between the printmaker and his or her audience, if you will, in the performance mode. Printmaking is partly a performance art, a visual art, and a technology art. An Ozine has to celebrate and share this; and in the age of digital reproduction, this is easy.

The question remains, “How do I share my Artist’s Proof magazine experience through PrintmakingWorld Ozine? How do I balance the elitist idea of fine art printmaking with today’s realities?’